Movie Nation

If you see one documentary about Russian hockey and the NHL’s historical connection to it — and there have been a few — make it “Red Penguins.” Director Gabe Polsky’s second crack at this subject (2014’s “Red Army” was good, too.) is a parable woven into a history lesson — how American capitalism met the “Leviathan” of Russian corruption, paranoia and thuggery, and had to flee.

And the timing of the film’s release — Aug. 4 — cannot help but make this whimsical tale’s dark undercurrents prophetic. It plays like a warning for the America Vladimir Putin and his biggest fan seem to want to make over in Russia’s image — corrupt, authoritarian, with an “elite” outside the rule of law.

The film is a brisk and often amusing history of how the Pittsburgh Penguins National Hockey League team bought a half-interest in the Red Army hockey squad, the powerhouse Soviet national team that found itself no longer viable with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The story begins with a gonzo giddiness as film producer and Penguins co-owner Howard Baldwin (“Ray,” and the hockey films “Sudden Death” and “Mystery Alaska”) decides to gamble on buying into the team (Michael J. Fox was also an investor), and sends hustler/promoter/marketer Steve Warshaw to Moscow to see what can be done to make it work.

Warshaw became the “crazy American freak,” he says, and the Russian partners interviewed here agree. He figured out how to rebrand the squad as “Red Penguins,” how to spruce up their decrepit “Ice Palace” for the games, and how to get fans to come back now that the CCCP was gone from their jerseys.

“Clean bathrooms and free toilet paper” were a plus. There’s a strip club tucked into the building where the arena is? “Stripper cheerleaders on skates,” sliding behind the Zamobini between periods, peeling off their clothes as they do.

They’d sell sponsorships for the first time, billboards in the arena, patches on the jerseys. Free Gillette razors night! Pittsburgh’s Iron City Beer is a sponsor? Free BEER night!

“We’d have drunk 14, 15 year-olds in the stands,” Warshaw laughs.

But the culture clash was there from the get-go. The Russians were prone to late nights and tardy, tipsy arrivals at work. And they were paranoid. A team that couldn’t fill its arena “if Jesus Christ resurrected” was part of the show was suddenly the hottest ticket in town again, internationally marketed, with Disney nipping at its heels for a piece. And surly Russian partners like the always-laughing/always-menacing Valery Gushen (interviewed extensively here) were SURE “they’re STEALING from us.”

It’s called “projecting,” a word that’s come into common currency the last four years. They were sure the Penguins were stealing from them because stealing is what they know and do.

But this early ’90s window, this “crazy world” that “we took advantage of” as Warshaw puts it, was to be brief. The shakedowns and extortion started early. The Russian mob (infamous “businessman” Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov appears on camera) muscled in.

And then the government collapsed into civil turmoil — riots, tanks on the streets, and this viperous runt named Putin was angling higher authority.

Polsky takes us on quite the sleigh ride, from the sunny silliness of gambling on Russian hockey, and then marketing it, to the grim reality that sets in — threats, intimidation and even murders.

Warshaw laughs about the stunts and gimmicks he unleashed to get butts in the seats of their arena and chuckles over a disastrous US tour, sending notes to the Disney chairman opening with “Dear Comrade Eisner.” Gushev laughs and laughs at the idea that a mob-connected “firm” put a spy/minder in Warshaw’s office with him in the later period of the partnership.

Polsky can be heard off-camera, offering sometimes incredulous, sometimes persistent questions in English and in Russian. An ex-KGB official is interrupted by Russian police in the middle of a Red Square interview. Outtakes are left in as Warshaw tries to keep his spin on this all glib and knowing. Baldwin is taken aback at Michael Eisner (not interviewed here) denying any Disney overtures on buying in or buying out the former Red Army team. Uh, it’s here, in WRITING, Comrade Eisner.

Every Russian, from team officials to media personalities, turns grimfaced as the “Constitutional Crisis” between Boris Yeltsin and hardliners in the parliament is revisited. It’s easy to see now as the beginning of the end of Russia’s dalliance with democracy.

But the real sage here is the mustache-waxed former team “mascot,” who’d yank off his penguin head so show the crowd his face — simply not done in North America. He is the one who philosophizes about American democratic capitalism facing “the Leviathan” of the Russian way, where “the mafia IS the system.”

With kidnappings and on-the-street shakedowns rampant, and an authoritarian kleptocracy of a “government” run by the biggest looters of all, Disney had the sense to back away from involvement. The Pittsburgh Penguins organization, and Warshaw, did too.

The sports to real life analogy in “Red Penguins” is hanging there, like a banner in the rafters of the arena of “The Greatest Hockey Team Ever.” Twenty years later, the rest of America decided to try its own Russian experiment in reverse. Will we wake up in time?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence/bloody images, sexual material/nudity, some strong language and a drug reference

Cast: Steve Warshaw, Howard Baldwin, Valery Gushen, Victor Gusev, Alimzha Tokhlaknunov

Credits: Written and directed by Gabe Polsky. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:2;

Translated from the printed page onto a black and white movie screen, removed from the heady “Eastern European novelist chic” of the Nabokov ’60s, and the kinky literary “freedom” of the age, Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird” can be appreciated for what it is.

It’s an act of revenge, a child survivor of the Holocaust’s lashing condemnation of the Europe, especially Eastern Europe, that unleashed it — superstitious, prejudiced, sadistic and cruel, amoral moralists almost to a one.

A picaresque and gruesomely sensationalist child’s odyssey set along the Polish-Soviet frontier, it’s a wonder anybody ever gave Kosinski the license to pass it off as “autobiography.” No, he survived the war hiding in plain sight in relative safety and comfort. And yes, he was a fabulist who might not have gotten away with the literary license he was granted when he was plagiarizing “Being There” and the works that made him.

Adapting “Painted Bird,” Czech actor-turned-director Václav Marhoul (“Smart Phillip”) serves up a film of excesses; violence ranging from animal cruelty to torture and murder, sexual perversion that gives bestiality a try, characters whose most “noble” moments are not murdering the child, and teaching him to kill. And, at a nearly relentless two hours and 49 minutes, “Painted Bird” is an excessive test of patience and tolerance for the range of human depravity touched on.

What, no cannibalism?

Petr Kotlár is Joska, an olive-skinned “other” who lives with his aunt and is assaulted by the locals any time he ventures out. Here is your first escape point in “The Painted Bird.” We meet him as a gang of boys chases him through the woods, beats him and tortures his pet mink to death.

Either you commit to seeing “The Painted Bird” through, or you move on. Because it doesn’t get any easier.

His aunt dies, and he accidentally burns her house down in the bargain. There will be no succor in the village, where the hateful, toothless rubes mutter (in Polish) “He’s bewitched the cows,” “He’s the seed of the Devil!” But an old seer (Alla Sokolova) pronounces a different verdict, which is both a condemnation and his salvation.

“He is a vampire,” she says. “I’ll buy him,” she says with her next breath.

This is the way of “The Painted Bird.” Joska, hounded and tormented, taken in by mentors all across this Hellscape.

Our first give-away to the era is spying a German observation plane. The front, when the movie begins, is far to the east, in Russia. But “the war” will return, with a vengeance, for the third act.

Joska will be taken on by a monstrous cat-fancying gristmill operator (Udo Kier), a catcher and seller of songbirds (giving the film its title) and an oversexed farm wench.

He will be “a gift for the Fritzes” (handed over to the Germans) but saved by the old Storm Trooper (Stellan Skarsgård) assigned to murder him, rescued by a sickly priest (Harvey Keitel, dubbed), passed on to another monster (Julian Sands), assailed by Cossacks and saved by the Red Army.
Barry Pepper plays a Soviet version of the sniper he portrayed in “Saving Private Ryan,” a lazy, unimaginative bit of casting that works.
Through it all, the child endures — fleeing a mob here, an awful living situation there — finally going mute at all he’s seen and survived.

Marhoul set out to make an “unblinking” adaptation of the novel, and he succeeded. I won’t say the flat, limited-contrast black and white cinematography is a plus, because it isn’t.

Avoiding the obvious trap of having our hero narrate his saga just makes it harder to grapple with what is happening, and why. We work for that. It’s a movie of little dialogue.

But at some point, one has to get off the fence about “The Painted Bird,” and either embrace or “appreciate” it — at arm’s length. I opt for the latter.

Agnieska Holland’s dark and grim but somewhat lighter boys-journey-through-the-Holocaust film, “Europa Europa” (1990), based on an actual memoir, gets across the same points without the just-swallowed-acid aftertaste.

Hatred fatigue sets in — hatred for the awful people who eagerly participate in one “wilding” after another, mobbing and assaulting the little boy for being either a “Gypsy” or a Jew, and maybe a little hatred for Kosinski for his obvious loathing and heartless judgement for the heartless.

The humanity that emerges from this story isn’t humane. Perhaps the only way this over-the-top WWII “Inferno” really works is as an “explanation for how I turned out,” as autobiography. And as we now know, that’s not true.

But as a depiction of the dark sides of human nature, stupid and instinctively cruel? Look around you. The author was on the money, passing on a warning from “then” that is just as apt “now.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, animal cruelty, bestiality — an NC-17 if ever there was one.

Cast: Petr Kotlár, Alla Sokolova, Udo Kier, Jitka Cvancarová, Stellan Skarsgård, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Radim Fiala and Barry Pepper

Credits: Written and directed by Václav Marhoul, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:49

Aug 21-28 this Jimmy Henderson “Let’s hunt convicts in the jungles of SE Asia” thriller streams.

“Lake of Death (De dødes tjern)” is a mildly creepy Norwegian thriller about a “haunted” lake and a young woman (Iben Akerlie) haunted by guilt over her long-missing twin brother.

It’s built on horror conventions that go back to Edgar Allan Poe, and worn out by every “Friday the 13th” variation since. But this time, it’s five good looking young Norwegians who head to the cabin in the woods to face the strange goings-on, bumps in the night, getting yanked under the water by “something” while swimming, visions of the missing brother and “Wait, who made us all breakfast?”

One of them, Bernhard (Jakob Schøyen Andersen) is a horror/ghost story podcaster, gathering audio on the legends of this lake, joking around with “Cabin Fever,” “Evil Dead” and a certain unfinished “Project” about an American witch movie references, and playing scary tricks on his fellow cabin campers.

And when they unwind, the kids rock out to “Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll,” because “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is entirely too on-the-nose for anybody to get away with these days.

There’s a dog, because of course there is.

“Anybody seen Totto?”

The foreshadowing is trifle obvious. Even the finale is guessable. But of course there are twists, a mild chill here and there, and not just from the lower depths of the lake in question.

“They say it’s BOTTOMless!”

Oslo-based writer-director Nini Bull Rabsahm has reimagined a haunted lake novel by André Bjerke, previously filmed in 1958.  She has a little fun with the conventions she’s working with. Just not enough.

Akerlie makes a properly spooked heroine, seeing black water coming out of the tap, bleeding out of walls and spat out of her friends — even if they can’t see it. Akerlie gives us equal measures of guilt and resignation. Whatever is going on, it’s everybody ELSE who is doing most of the freaking out about the “Lake of Death.”

She keeps seeing images of her brother (Patrick Walshe McBride, not a Scandinavian so we’ll make him deaf-mute to save on language lessons).

The setting and cast make this pleasant enough to sit through, if a bit of a yawner. Ms. Robsahm must have realized that if we “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” there’s really not much point.

Cast:  Iben Akerlie  Patrick Walshe McBride, Jakob Schøyen Andersen, Elias Munk, Jonathan Harboe, Ulric von der Esch and Sophie Lie.

Credits: Written and directed by Nini Bull Robsahm, inspired by the 1958 film “Lake of the Dead” and the 1942 novel by  André Bjerke.   A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:34

A child is separated from his parents, who spend years searching for him during Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge holocaust, in the simply but elegantly animated drama “Funan.”

It’s another version of “The Killing Fields,” with somewhat less killing. Gunfire only erupts in the grim third act, years into the murderous reign of the folks Spalding Grey famously labeled “Cambodian rednecks” in his monologue/history/memoir “Swimming to Cambodia.”

Director and co-writer Denis Do’s feature animation directing debut takes a familiar path, briefly showing us the civilized, peaceful if not entirely carefree Cambodia of the early ’70s. That was before the rural Khmer Rouge (“Cambodians with red scarves”) and their “Angkor” mythic communist party overran the country and its feckless leadership.

The extended family of Chou (voiced by Bérénice Bejo) and Khuon (Louis Garrel), including their three year-old son Sovanh, are herded out of the cities and into the countryside.

“The Revolution is underway,” they are lectured. “Minds must be cleared of ‘foreign influence,'” they are lectured (in French, with English subtitles). “Angkor will take care of you!”

Stripped of most of their possessions, they’re forced to labor on communes — rice farms, lumber harvesting, all of it by hand “the old ways.” They’re making Cambodia great again by taking it back hundreds of years to its Angkor Wat/”Funan” past.

Brother Meng (Brice Montagne), drawn with a perpetual scowl, sees the tactics and recognizes the end game. They’re being threatened and summarily executed for “crimes,” real and imagined. They’re starved and worked to death.

The Khmer Rouge are “breaking us, one by one. We must FLEE Cambodia!”

But Chou and Khuon cannot leave. Her mother and their little boy were separated from them on the “death march” to the camp. They must find them. It takes years.

There are moving moments in the film’s situations and the characters’ struggles — women and men learning the grim calculus of survival under a murderously primitive and authoritarian regime.

“Eating is EVERYthing” they begin to realize.

Treachery, sexual exchanges for food, befriending that one guard you recognize from “before,” all will play a part. Not everyone will survive this. Millions of Cambodians didn’t.

This European production is more a reminder of what went on than a story that brings fresh horrors to light. The cruelty of separating children from their parents in “camps” makes it topical in a world and US roiled by immigrant-phobia.

And the animation is more a simple service to the story than anything dazzling or impressive. “Funan” fails that one crucial animation test, “Does this story need animation to be told?” But simple and simplified, “Funan” still manages to present a grim history lesson in a sometimes-moving, almost kid-friendly animated package.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, depictions of war, murder and suicide.

Cast: Bérénice Bejo, Louis Garrel, Colette Kieffer, Brice Montagne and Aude-Laurence Clermont Biver

Credits: Directed by Denis Do, script by Denis Do,Magali Pouzol and Elise Trinh. A Universal/G Kids release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:24

Olga Kurylenko is the disturbed mother, Claes Bang of “The Square” and “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is the husband.

And Brian Cox is here to keep everybody calm in the face of, well, you’ll see.
“The Bay of Silence” opens Aug 28.

Orlando Bloom frittered away his A-list movie star years acting in action franchises and coupling with models, starlets and pop stars.

But every now and again, usually in a movie nobody gets around to seeing, he reminds us he can be more than tabloid fodder. Once in a blue moon, he takes on a film and a role with substance.

“Retaliation,” which was filmed in 2017, is a drama that presents him as a tormented soul, a man who has squandered whatever potential he might have had for a life in home demolition.

Malcolm, “Malky” to his mates, is a brooding, quiet, ill-tempered mug who wields his sledgehammer with particular relish on his latest work site — knocking down an old church.

He lives with his aged mother (Anne Reid), has a few drinks at the pub with his mates, letting mouthy Jo (Alex Fern) hold the floor, regaling one and all of tales of Malky’s temper.

Every so often, Malky ducks away for furtive, furious fornication with the fetching barmaid, Emma (Jennifer Montgomery).

But left by himself, his usual choice, he rends his flesh and he carves words into his hammer’s handle. He pushes away Emma any time there’s even a hint of intimacy.

“You think I need you? I don’t need anybody.”

And as miserable as he seems, that’s nothing compared to the tailspin he goes into the moment he spies the man who used to be the priest there, white-haired with age but still recognizable.

A reckoning is coming. The man with a violent temper and impulse control wrestles with formless notions of revenge. And the tirades and tender mercies of a street preacher (Charlie-Creed-Miles) foretell violence, revenge or perhaps some other form of redemption.

Bloom does a nice job of expressing, wordlessly, where this man has been, what blend of guilt, fury and obligation drive him and shaped his life. It’s not the most subtle character or film built around an abuse survivor, but there’s substance in the performance that lifts “Retaliation” above its hammered-home metaphors.

Montgomery, an “Entourage” and “This is Us” veteran, brings a fragile earthiness to Emma, and and Fern is given a couple of pub monologues overflowing with color and wit, even if they stop the film.

That’s what first-time feature directors like the Shammasian Brothers do — let themselves get distracted.

Reid-Miles almost steals the picture as an unschooled man-of-faith with the zeal of the “converted,” and just enough of his past poking through to make him fascinating.

The COVID pandemic derailing the theatrical film release model has meant that little films with modest expectations have had a chance to shine — Tom Hardy’s “Capone,” the combat thriller “The Outpost” in which Bloom also appears, and this movie that slips out in between Orlando Bloom/Katy Perry and Baby Makes Three tales from the tabloids.

Here’s to hoping that he and filmmakers looking for a star to carry their indie drama make something of it.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent/sexual content, language throughout, and some nudity

Cast: Orlando Bloom, Janet Montgomery, Charles Reid-Miles, Alex Fern and Anne Reid,

Credits: Directed by Ludwig Shammasian, Paul Shammasian, written by Geoff Thompson. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

A vacation that goes wrong, a daughter kidnapped.

This one’s due out Aug. 21.

Bloom is in “The Outpost,” which has done quite well as a streaming title.

And now, this Friday, comes “Retaliation.”

Legolas is gone. The tabloid headlines? Fading.

Maybe he’ll start showing us something again, and not his naked butt on a paddleboard on all the gossip sites.